Veles peeked out the carriage window at the passing scenery. Although he’s gotten used to some of the more primitive aspects of this world in the twenty years he’d spent in it, the sudden appearance of his long-lost friends had made the memories of… home… seem so much closer. And unfortunately for the party, Gregory’s carriage was as expensive as it was mundane. Without magic to smooth the ride, every bump in the road jolted Veles around.
That being said, Veles’ seat certainly was well cushioned. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like to ride in most of the other wagons that made up the caravan.
The carriage ride had started out rather boring. While he’d made a lot of improvements to the city of Bridge’Ithe, only those in the downtown core could really afford them. It wasn't long after they’d crossed the bridge that they entered the poorer, more rural outskirts of the city and the well-manicured buildings gave way to the straw huts and smell of livestock that Veles’ expected from a medieval world.
As Veles stared out the carriage window at another cow chewing its cud behind a dilapidated fence, he felt a slight jab in his ribs.
“Master look!” came a shrill but excited hiss from next to him, “Palseks see thing out window!”
“Huh?” Veles said rather nonchalantly, failing to recognize that excitement that had caused the kobold next to him to slip back into her racial subservience. But that indifference vanished the moment Veles turned his towards Palseks’ side of the carriage.
Several hundred yards to the side of the road, laying motionless in an otherwise overgrown field, was something that Veles had never expected to see in a DnD game – sitting on top of a large metal frame was a five bladed rotor. At the front, two bulbous cockpits, below which sat a chaingun. And sitting just behind the passenger compartment doors were small two wings, each of which was armed with a mixture of rocket and missile pods.
“Don’t fucking tell me someone invited Jim…” Charlie muttered from the other side of the carriage.
Veles might have spent twenty years here, but he still remembered the game night they had “three months” ago. Jim had gotten into a fight with Finn and Paul and started mocking them by claiming that he sexually identified as an attack helicopter.
What Charlie was saying must have been what was on everyone’s mind at that moment. Jim was a persona non-grata at DnD games now, but he must have found out – and shown up. And Finn, being Finn, must have given Jim exactly what he “wanted”.
Veles couldn’t help but realize that he found some strange sense of satisfaction in the idea of Jim having being turned into what he claimed to sexually identify as, but he also knew that wasn’t what happened. That stupid old joke was about a person identifying as an Apache attack helicopter, while what was sitting in the field was something else – it was a Russian Hind.
“A Hind-D?” Veles gawked.
“It’s just like my Japanese anime!” Geoffrey chuckled.
“Oh my gods,” Charlie rolled his eyes.
“You’re that ninja?” Veles replied.
"A woman?" Palseks chirped from the top of the carriage.
“Psycho Mantis?” Charlie shot back with a grin. Then he frowned, looking back at the incongruous vehicle in the middle of the fantasy world. “Why the hell did Finn insert a meme into this world?”
He might not have, Veles realized as he thought back to Glitz’ spellbook, polymorph magic required the caster to steal the soul from a victim. If the victim’s soul wasn’t replaced with something else, their body turned into a sort of blank. The hag’s was cat themed, so she left behind helpless catgirls and catbois. It stood to reason that Glitz’ magic worked the same way, and left something behind that was… hind themed.
“What a moron,” Veles thought to himself. Finn must not have known what a hind was and when he searched for one on the internet, a picture of that attack helicopter was the only thing that popped up. That, of course, led to the question of whether the simulation they now found themselves in had realized how stupid an anthropomorphic attack helicopter would be, and adjusted Glitz’ form to make it more sensible, or whether Finn had done some more research and just decided to have Glitz’ victims turn into Hind helicopters as some sort of in-joke.
Veles hoped he was right. He liked Jim. And he shuddered at the thought that Jim had been sitting in that field for the past twenty years, trapped in that body, just waiting for someone to come fly him. Then again, the helicopter did look relatively new.